American Conservatives
         Piano Works

* Paul Creston:
     - Piano Sonata
     - Six Preludes
* Vittorio Giannini:
     - Piano Sonata
* Nicolas Flagello:
     - Two Waltzes
     - Piano Sonata

Tatjana Rankovich (piano)
Phoenix USA PHCD 143 Total time: 70:30

Summary for the Busy Executive: Winning.

This disc brings together piano music from 20th-century Italian-American
composers largely ignored.  Although they all had performances of their
works and commissions at least some time in their careers, these men came
under a cloud of indifference.  To a great extent, American music passed
them by.  I would also contend that while their talents were true, they
Were minor (excepting Flagello), and for some reason, people don't want
to spend time with anything less than the absolute bona fide best.  It's
a version of the Beethoven's Ninth Syndrome.  The problem is that, taking
the attitude to its extreme, you wind up listening to just one work.  So
the question really is how much dross you will tolerate.  Will you listen
to Brahms's Second? Mahler's Fifth? Bach's Cantata No. 10? How about
Grieg's Piano Concerto or Schubert's Rosamunde music? The syndrome
indicates, in my opinion, an unhealthy attitude toward art that segregates
it to the quasi-sacred part of our lives, rather than relates it to all
parts of our lives.  In other words, art shouldn't necessarily be something
we have to dress up for.

I'm not really speaking to the problem of "light music" here.  For example,
I know of no truly light work by Flagello.  However, I contend that
ignoring marvelous composers like Hummel and Vorisek just because they
happen to have had the bad luck to work beside Haydn and Beethoven or a
terrific symphony like Sullivan's "Irish" because of Schumann and Brahms
cuts down on a significant amount of sheer pleasure.  "Let us now praise
famous men," of course, but gold can be found other places as well,
including backwaters and spots away from the mother lode.  The artistically
genuine and effective is rare enough in any case.  We shouldn't scorn it
simply because we don't recognize the signature at the bottom of the page.

Giannini's music moves me the least.  I recognize its craft, but it
never really seems to escape its many and considerable influences.  The
critic Winton Dean described Giannini's idiom as "grittier Menotti," but
Menotti, whatever his faults, has a recognizable voice of his own - a
mighty valuable artistic asset.  On the other hand, I couldn't recognize
a Giannini work I hadn't heard before.  Although I've probably listened
to more Giannini than most, however, I have heard by no means all of his
output and what I've heard has been necessarily randomly met.  So take
what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.  In a sense, Giannini is
too cultivated a composer.  He knows his craft and the tradition to a
fare-thee-well, but his good taste seems to stop him from taking necessary
risks.  In a light mood, he can charm you.  In a somber one, he can lose
you.  His piano sonata provides a good case.  A very serious work, it
responds to a crisis in Giannini's life.  The writing for the piano is
skillfully varied and suits the instrument.  But, despite its ambitions
and its seriousness, it throws off fewer sparks than, say, Prokofiev's
"March" from The Love of Three Oranges or Flagello's Two Waltzes.

The apocryphal story goes that Giuseppe Guttoveggio chose the name "Paul
Creston" from a phone book.  According to writer and producer Walter
Simmons, Creston got his name from a Goldoni role ("Crespini") he acted in
a high-school play.  His high-school friends nicknamed him "Cress." And he
liked the name "Paul." He was, if not entirely self-taught as a composer,
then almost entirely so.  His music exhibits both the glories and pitfalls
of the autodidact.  On the one hand, he sounds like no one else, with an
immediately-identifiable world of rhythm and harmony.  On the other, that
world turns out to be rather a limited one.  For me, his best work is his
Symphony No. 2, with the Partita a close second - both classics, I
believe, of 20th-century music.  They deserve their place: colorful,
vivacious appeals to the ears and feet.  His attempts to expand on
this world, to write more "important" pieces, never really succeeded.
Nevertheless, his groove, though well-worn, retains its considerable
fascination.

That Creston didn't hit his groove right away surprised me, since so
many autodidacts begin mainly with an idiom.  One hears in the early
piano sonata, for example, Creston's influences - namely, the harmonies of
Debussy and Ravel.  Indeed, the opening reminds me a little of Debussy's
early Symphony in b (for piano 4-hands), the second a bit of Prokofiev's
Classical Symphony gavotte, the third of Ravel's Valses nobles et
sentimentales.  It's not a matter of conscious plagiarism, but of a bunch
of things not quite yet absorbed.  However, a few years later, these same
elements somehow find new meanings in Creston's very original music, so
original that one no longer thinks of influences.  By the time of the Six
Preludes in 1945, Creston has definitely found himself.  The harmonies
become slightly more astringent, and one hears a new fascination with
cross-rhythms and syncopation.  Indeed, Creston conceives the preludes
primarily as rhythmic studies, although these highly poetic, even fun
pieces stand as far from the normal image of "study" as one can get.
Each prelude makes an expressive point as well as a technical one.

Flagello, a pupil of Giannini, surpassed his teacher.  Even his early
works, "happy" and "sad," percolate with a more unconventional emotional
element, more jagged feeling, more storms.  Flagello has a large, expansive
artistic nature, that threatens to blow up small pieces.  The ideas are
often bigger than the miniature can hold.  The Two Waltzes escape this
fate more than others do, but significantly Flagello incorporated both into
larger works - the Suite for harp and string trio and the scherzo of the
first symphony, respectively.  The piano sonata, a major item in Flagello's
catalogue, has appeared on at least two other CDs.  Full-blooded, virtuosic
music, Romantic in aesthetic and modern in harmonic outlook, it promises
much and delivers all of it.  The slow movement in particular is a killer.
A barcarolle that works against type - most barcarolles float along
serenely - it essentially howls from the depths.  Easily the finest item on
the program, the sonata deserves to be better-known.  I'd put it up there
with the Barber piano sonata, a classic of American repertoire.

Rankovich, one of those miracle musicians who can make musical architecture
breathe and come alive, can also thrill you just with her sound.  I have
seldom heard the musical climax to phrases so tellingly prepared for and
placed without losing a sense of the thrust of the entire movement.  Most
of the works here don't require a pianist this good.  Certainly the
Crestons don't, despite their genuine attractiveness.  Still, she lavishes
her considerable musicianship on them and makes a persuasive case.  You
know just how good a musician she is when you realize that the Creston and
the Giannini works are premiere recordings.  To all intents and purposes,
she's the moonwalker.  She hasn't heard these pieces before.  Later
interpreters will take *her* readings into account.  If the Giannini falls
flat, it's not for her lack of trying.  I do think the fault lies in the
second-hand, overdone gestures of the work - like trying to take seriously
Hamlet played by Jon Lovitz's Master Thespian.  I've heard three pianists
do the Flagello sonata: Peter Vinograde (Albany TROY234), Joshua Pierce
(Premiere PRCD1014), and Rankovich.  Vinograde and Rankovich compete for
top honors, and I give Vinograde the lead in the first movement, Rankovich
in the second.  The Vinograde disc sports an all-Flagello program,
including the violin sonata, as does the Pierce (works for piano and
percussion).  You might want all three, but I'd definitely go with the
Vinograde and the Rankovich.

Walter Simmons, one of the great promoters of composers (especially
Flagello) fashion has passed by, has done his usual superb job of recording
and providing liner notes.  His discs always tell me something new and
valuable about these artists and introduce me to works that we really
shouldn't lose.  A winner of a disc.

Steve Schwartz